Comments on: Raise Your Hand If You Hate Emoticons

By: Sonya

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By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 05:10:14 +0000

I have a tech friend who was active in the early days of the internet. By early days I do not mean in the 1990s. I mean the seventies. He said the smiley (emoticons) appeared to help prevent misunderstandings in rapidly typed and sent messages between engineers and programmers. Fair enough.
The only time I use them is when I share a joke with my students who use English as a second language. Emoticons and smileys are of great use to students of a language.
With highly fluent and native speakers I had always found the use of things like ‘ho ho ho’ sufficed perfectly to express in writing the equivalent of a laugh, or that the reader was not to take something seriously.
Other use of them says to me ‘I can’t be bothered to craft this expression with any style or eloquence. so dammit, here’s an emoticon. You know what I mean.’
I bitterly bemoan the necessity of these things whenever anyone needs to crack a joke. Take Groucho Marx’s comment: ‘These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.’ Funny? Should be. Put a laughing emoticon at the end of it and see how funny it looks then.
Resorting to emoticons instead of normal writing and having to use smileys in order to express humour highlights the present trend of not only a popular devaluation of elegance in writing and expression, but also an obnoxious habit of somehow finding amusement in pretending to be illiterate. This use rather like a school boy writing ‘i wuz ere’ on a desk in order to share a few infantile snickers with a friend. Sad face.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 12:43:04 +0000

If I was interested in a girl and she kept using emoticons, that would be a deal breaker for me. They just irritate me.

By: Kenneth

Kenneth — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:28:33 +0000

I just cannot get out of the habit of putting an apostrophe in to create a possessive “it’s”.

By: Casey

Casey — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:04:29 +0000

As do errant apostrophes...

By: Kenneth

Kenneth — Wed, 14 May 2008 01:18:57 +0000

Of course I meant, “I hope”, and not “Hope I”. Dyslexia, like paranoia, strikes deep.

By: Kenneth

Kenneth — Wed, 14 May 2008 01:16:28 +0000

I have a firm rule against using anything of the sort in my professional emails. It is just, well, unprofessional. But here is a bit of a funny: I unfortunately use AOL. When I send an IM with my phone number (with an area code of 818) AOL automatically converts it to 81 smiley face!!!! Makes for interesting comments when I am IM’ing with a business associate. But such is the ubiquitous nature of those silly things that AOL takes it out of it’s poor simplistic users’ hands. Hope I our favorite blogger has time for us in the next couple of weeks. Word has it her calendar is quite full.

By: Casey

Casey — Mon, 12 May 2008 09:01:06 +0000

The book’s been in the back of my mind since I saw that New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece last YEAR…I think the no-sarcasm rule is a great start. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the use of emoticons is considered somewhat feminine (I say sneaking because I have no basis for it), so you might want to keep that in mind when corresponding with clients.

By: Bev

Bev — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:18:10 +0000

I had to turn my head and squint a bit to see Homer in that emoticon.

This is a question I’ve struggled with and probably will continue to in my professional emails. My friends can tolerate my winky faces and still want to be my friends – my professional contacts….some yes, some no.

So I try to follow the “no sarcasm in professional email” rule, and continue to blunder along…I may have to add that book to my list.